Representing a ContinentA new botanical garden in Melbourne favors reference over
replication.

By Marc Treib

Mark Stoner

As both a continent and a country, Australia challenges
those collecting and presenting its flora. The distances across its surfaces
are enormous, its geographies are highly varied, its climatic diversity
extreme. In response, the number of species of flora and fauna that have
evolved—and today still survive—in these conditions is correspondingly vast;
among the eucalyptus alone are more than 700 types, all but a handful found
native in Australia.

The recently completed Australian Garden at the Cranbourne
annex to the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne addresses these horticultural
issues square on, but its displays make no attempt to mimic natural patterns
found in the wild. The design scores successes on several fronts, finishing off
a brilliant conceptual idea with precisely resolved construction details and
sophisticated applications of living and inert materials. Although particular to
making botanic gardens, many of the concerns that lie behind the design apply
more broadly to other landscape typologies as well. These include the composing
of ecotopes, visitor orientation and education, the role of imitation in
fashioning landscape form, and, not least of all, the art of landscape design
in the early years of the 21st century. In addition, the design of the
botanical garden raises the greater question of landscape as representation.
For example, do designed landscapes that suggest, or even replicate, the
natural geographies with which their visitors are familiar provide a more
comfortable base from which to understand their ecologies? And what is the role
of abstraction in landscape design in general and public landscapes such as these
in particular?

The botanical garden represents a specialized type of
landscape with demands unique to its mission: to propagate plants from various
geographic locations within a limited area governed by local soil and climatic
conditions removed from the plant’s point of origin. When the collection
comprises only native varieties, or those indigenous to a small nation, the
trials may be few. But the difficulties compound accordingly when the
institution is faced with the prospect of collecting flora from a vast
continent marked by drastic variations in aridity and fertility. Irrigation and
amended soils mitigate the problems of moisture and nourishment respectively;
glass houses modulate problematic temperatures. But viewed more generally, the
notion of assembling plants from around the world within a single ecological
zone is inherently fraught with problems.

In the past decade, new botanical gardens have tended to
steer a safer course, restricting their collections to species and varieties
that thrive under local circumstances. In the Jardi Botànic in Barcelona
(1999), for example, architects Carlos Ferrater and Josep Lluis Canosa and
landscape architect Bet Figueras provided the landscape for vegetation limited
to Mediterranean climates. The network of walkways that enmesh the hillside
also structures collections from Africa, the Canary Islands, Chile, California,
the Mediterranean itself, and Australia, each zone heralded by a small plaza
marking the intersection of two or more paths. The lesson learned is that
similar climates—thousands of miles apart in location—may generate and support
vegetation quite different in size, color, and form.